Perpetual Warfare and its Cost to Men (A Call for Submissions)

What should we do about the military disposability of men?

One of the longest wars in US history grinds on with no criteria for ending it, no good reasons for its perpetuation and one of the results is the psychological destruction of thousands of US military soldiers since the war began both on the battlefield and off. While casualties on the field have been significantly reduced compared to previous wars in history, the psychological cost has been devastating.

In 2013, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs released a study that covered suicides from 1999 to 2010, which showed that roughly 22 veterans were dying by suicide per day, or one every 65 minutes. Some sources suggest that this rate may be under-counting suicides.

Not discussing the horrors of drone strikes which take thousands of civilian lives alongside enemy forces, there doesn’t seem to be a plan for ending this war in the foreseeable future.

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What do you think? What should we do as civilians of a government which seems bent on continuing to send lives into this war zone without any idea of what it will take to consider this war ended?

How do we perpetuate this war with the understanding, the longer we engage in it the more insurgents we inspire and the greater the economic and social costs we incur as a nation?

How do you think we should handle the perpetual warfare perspective of our nation?

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About Thaddeus Howze

Thaddeus Howze was a New York native and found his way to the West Coast as a consequence of his military service. He's a California-based technology executive and author whose non-fiction and online journalism has appeared in publications such as The Enemy, Black Enterprise Online, Urban Times, the Good Men Project, and Astronaut.com. Thaddeus Howze has published two books, Hayward's Reach (2011) and Broken Glass (2013). He maintains a nonfiction blog on science and technology at A Matter of Scale (bit.ly/matterofscale). He writes speculative fiction at hubcityblues.com.

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For the most part in the not too distant future, wars will be fought digitally and electronically. Commanded by geeks raised on pac man with relatively small insertions of humans to root out other electronic systems commandeered by equally herd human beings on the other side. It will be more guerrilla type warfare where larger forces of disposable humans will not be effective to fight it. Our own American revolutionary soldiers proved that point.